Short of kidnapping Tim Cook and waterboarding him, we couldn't be more sure the iPad 3 will boast a mega-pretty retina display resolution. But buzzwordiness aside, just how much better will the new sharpness be? It makes everything that came before it look puny. See for yourself.

iOS developer James Thomson decided to whip together a "just in case" mockup icon for his PCalc app—rendered in 2048x1536 Retina Display, and seen on the far right. That's the rumored resolution for the iPad 3, and James isn't working off anything more than rumors, but even if he's close, we've got a pretty jarring statement of how ginormous that screen is going to be; the standard icons from an iPad 2 and iPhone 4S (left and middle, respectively) are dwarfed. But the iPad 3 prototype? Bigger and crisp.

This isn't going to be a slight eyeball upgrade—if icons are going to be bumped up this much, just imagine everything else. The iPad 3's screen is going to be a rectangle of LCD art. [James Thomson via Cult of Mac]